Oscar winner Chloé Zhao reflected on her career as a neurodivergent filmmaker at a BFI London Film Festival session on Sunday morning.
The Chinese director, who on Saturday premiered her long-awaited Hamnet alongside stars Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, spoke candidly to a small audience about crafting Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017), Nomadland (2020) — the feature that brought her Academy Award acclaim — and Eternals (2021).
“I’m neurodivergent, so I’ve always [been] quite confused why I don’t fit in, or why certain things are so easy for other people but so hard for me — like small talk,” Zhao began when asked about being an actor’s director. “It’s very easy for me to be overstimulated, because I take in a lot more information. I’m already assuming what you think of me,” she said, gesturing to an audience member. “What does your outfit mean? Where do you come from? I do these things all the time. I can’t shut it off.”
“But later on, once I understood it and I could put language around it, I [realized] I have the ability to recognize patterns, maybe I’m just faster or more sensitive. So if that’s used in the right space, then I can almost predict certain situations. It’s helpful if you are on set and just feeling the dissonance [with actors]. Even off camera, you want to go, ‘What is it?’ And usually in that kind of setting, they will share, and then you go, ‘Okay, what’s underneath is actually interesting. This is not what we wrote for this character in this moment. But that’s where you are right now. So are you willing to take the mask right now and let the world see what’s underneath?’ It’s not always a yes — certainly with the professional actors… but if they do in that moment, it’s really special because that’s the kind of authenticity that I think is a performer’s greatest gift to the world.”
Zhao joked about her extreme sensitivity to this dissonance: “So if you’re smiling and you’re actually sad, that’s why small talk is hard. I go: ‘What’s happened?’ What’s your childhood trauma?’ which is not always welcome,” she added as the crowd laughed.
“I think it’s a superpower, I really do,” she continued. “And it’s a spectrum. So everyone is very different… I find that I question sometimes: am I not the typical one? Or has our world become a little bit too inhabitable? Is this too loud? Is it too bright? It’s too fast, you know? So I try to not think of it as less different,” she said. “If I tune into how I function then I’m going to create a world, not just on camera, but also off camera, that is going to be healthy for me.”
Zhao is in London promoting her newest film Hamnet, starring Irish talent Mescal as William Shakespeare and Buckley as his wife, Agnes, who are thrown into contrasting experiences of grief following the death of their young son, Hamnet. The gut-wrenching drama had audiences reaching for the tissues at Saturday’s premiere.
The filmmaker is also well known for making the MCU’s 2021 blockbuster Eternals, a departure from the realism of her previous films. Though Zhao said the feature’s sci-fi and fantasy elements were a huge draw for her. “My dream when I was a girl was to become a manga artist,” said the Beijing-born director. “I drew Japanese manga religiously every day, and I consumed everything there was at that time. So I have always loved telling stories through fantasy or mythology.”
Eternals, starring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Barry Keoghan, Richard Madden and Gemma Chan, is still the only film of Zhao’s that she storyboarded. “Because my manga skills!” she giggled. “I really enjoyed them, [drawing] the big eyes.”
On making the Marvel film, Zhao explained that she was at a moment in her life where “a lot of stuff was bubbling inside of me.”
“I made three films, I traveled around, I met people, and I looked at the East and the West, I looked at different cultures I encountered,” she said. “It was like a volcano inside of me that wanted to examine the human condition so desperately. I’m still sort of working through the eruption and that eruption was Eternals.”
Growing up in Beijing, she added, meant that Zhao and her family were able to watch one Western film a week. Her first ever? The Terminator (1984). “I know. It’s great,” she said. “The second one I saw was Ghost and then the third one was Sister Act.”
The BFI London Film Festival 2025 runs Oct. 8-19.